[gst-devel] Autoplugging with multiple sinks

[Richard Boulton]

On Sun, Sep 10, 2000 at 04:41:51PM +0200, Wim Taymans wrote:
> No, not possible yet. I think you even get an error if you place more than
> one sink in the pipeline.
Yup.

> Yes, just loop over the different sinks and compute the elements needed for
> it. The only difficulty will be to decide when to add a tee element.
It would want to share as much of the pathway as possible.  Perhaps you
could do:

1) Calculate the pathways from the src to each sink and choose the
   shortest of these.  Suppose it goes to sink1.
2) Calculate the pathways from each element in the path src->sink1 to all
   the other sinks.  Choose the shortest of these.  Suppose it goes to
   sink2.
3) Repeat 2) with all the remaining sinks, considering all the elements in
   the pathways decided so far.

A Tee would then be added at each place where the paths diverge.

I wonder how you'd generalise that to multiple sources.  You could specify
that all the data must go through a single link at some point to separate
out the src and sink problems, but that seems rather unsatisfactory.

> Same as the sink case. Again difficuties in finding out when to add a mixer
> element or somesuch if different sources output video and you only have
> one videosink.
Or, if you have two videosources and two videosinks, which ones should
connect to which.

It might be a reasonable restriction to say that you can have 1 sink and
lots of src's or 1 src and lots of sinks, but not both.

-- 
Richard